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‘Collector car values’: 114 Posts

The Rover SD1 wasn’t a big seller in the U.S., where it was offered for 1980 only, but it was a more common sight in its home market—particularly in the “jam sandwich” livery of the police, who appreciated its 3,532-cc all-aluminum V-8. Earlier this month, an SD1 once used by police to nab speeders on the Stonehaven Bypass in Scotland was bought at auction by the Grampian Transport Museum, guaranteeing its return to Aberdeenshire. The hammer price of £9,750, the equivalent of about $15,000, was claimed to be a new record for an SD1 sold at auction.

The Rover is a Vitesse model, with a 190-hp version of the V-8. (The SD1 was also sold with six- and four-cylinder gas engines, and a four-cylinder diesel, in its home market, but not over here.) The car was given a full restoration, which is to be chronicled on the Channel 4 series For the Love of Cars in the U.K. Among its original features are its blue lights and sirens, which are in good working order.

Commissioned by the police in 1985, the SD1 spent its career chasing down the high-performance executive vehicles—typically, Audi 100s and quattros—that the rapidly growing North Sea oil industry had brought to that part of Scotland. (Remember the 1983 film Local Hero?) It was offered at Coys’ Autosport auction at the NEC in Birmingham on January 10.

“We’ve been aware of this particular vehicle for some time now—it’s no stranger to our museum and in fact has appeared here before. When we found out that it was up for sale it was always our intention to try and bring this rare example ‘back home,’” said Mike Ward, the museum’s curator. “It’s sure to be a fantastic addition to our collection and we’ll also make sure it’s put to good use at our very popular Emergency Vehicle Rides session which takes place on 10th April.”

Even the littlest of cars got in on the record-setting action this past weekend at the Monterey auctions, where a doorless Mini beach car, one of a dozen or so built for promotional purposes, sold for $181,500.

As Jeroen Booij wrote in his recently released Maximum Mini 2, the Mini beach car arose out of BMC’s desire to have a car to compete directly with the Fiat Jolly, a car proving popular with wealthy Europeans looking for tenders for their yachts. Rather than go with the fringed surrey top of the Jolly, BMC’s chief stylist Dick Burzi designed a floating roof, supported only by the A- and C-pillars. He stripped off the doors and added the grab handles and wicker seats typical of the Jolly, but left the rest of the car standard Mini. A prototype Wolseley Hornet featured Burzi’s ribbed roof, but the production version ended up merely using a modified version of the Mini saloon body shell.

Exactly how many beach cars BMC built, nobody seems to know for sure. Bonhams, which handled the sale this past weekend, claims 14. Booij says that figure is likely, but it could be anywhere from nine to 16, and other sources range from two to 20. While BMC apparently considered making beach cars available on order, it ended up building them in 1961 and 1962, largely to help promote the Mini’s launch in the United States and North America (though BMC did loan one to the queen of England, and Booij mentions one custom-built to match a customer’s yacht). The later Mini Moke ended up filling the role that BMC initially envisioned for the Mini beach car.

The beach car in question, chassis number A-AY1L-197664/BMC62197664, originally went to San Francisco Austin dealer Kjell Qvale, who, according to the Bonhams description of the car, held on to it after its days promoting Minis were over. He first put it to use on his ranch and then later put it in cold storage, not to come out for a couple of decades. Since then, it’s passed through just two more owners and accumulated less than 12,000 miles, along with a 2007 refurbishment. The original 34hp 848cc four-cylinder remains, though a later transmission was installed.

Before the auction, Bonhams estimated the beach car to sell for $70,000 to $90,000. It ended up hammering for $165,000, making the final sale price $181,500 with commission, and setting a world auction record for a non-works Mini. Works Minis have long since surpassed that amount, notably in 2007 when a 1964 Mini Cooper 1275S that won the RAC Rally sold for £100,500, or about $197,000 at the time.

UPDATE (27.August 2014): Looks like Jeroen Booij got to talk to the new owner, who apparently read the comments on this post and who plans to drive it around his Florida community populated with Jollys and Mokes.

For the third time this summer, the public auction record for the Lamborghini Countach has fallen, after a 1974 Countach LP400 Periscopica sold for $1.87 million over the weekend.

While the first of the record-setting sales – in early June at the Bonhams auction in Greenwich, Connecticut – made headlines when another Periscopica (chassis number 1120066) sold for $1.21 million, including commission, thus marking the supercar’s transition from bedroom poster fodder to seven-figure blue chip collector car, the two more recent sales have garnered a little less attention. Less than a month later – in late June at the Bonhams auction at the Goodwood Festival of Speed – another Periscopica (chassis number 1120070) sold for £953,500, or about $1.624 million.

Photo by Kurt Ernst.

The most recent sale amounted to a fraction of some of the more sensational record-breakers around the Monterey peninsula over the last week. The Countach in question (chassis number 1120010) hammered for $1.7 million Saturday evening before commissions brought the final sale price up to $1.87 million. Believed to be the sixth Countach built, the Periscopica originally sold in late July 1974 to the carmaker Innocenti, according to Gooding’s auction description. Though originally painted light metallic green, the Lamborghini factory apparently repainted it light red for Innocenti.

By the early 1980s, it made its way from Italy to the United States and has remained largely untouched since then, with less than 12,000 miles on its odometer. Gooding’s writeup noted a recent service and detailing for the Countach, but described it as largely unrestored. The pre-auction estimate for the car ranged from $600,000 to $800,000.

I found myself compelled to contribute to a discussion in an online automotive aftermarket forum a few months ago: Someone had asked the group how they could activate a young audience – that seems to only want the expensive custom cars seen in music videos and movies – to become aftermarket consumers. An industry executive (a Baby Boomer, judging by his avatar photo) chimed in with something to the effect of, “Tell ‘em to go buy a used car and start working on it, like I did.” That brief exchange spoke volumes about the collector car industry right now: The Baby Boomer generation is largely populating the decision-making roles, the implementers are a section of Generation X-ers who are not considered early-adopters, and neither of them have a clue as to how to talk to the valuable youth market they all know they need to engage – a group, by the way, that isn’t even involved in the discussion.

Fourteen years into the new millennium, nobody living and working within the collector car universe needs to be told that we’re experiencing what we in the media politely refer to as the “graying of the hobby.” And while gray hair is certainly nothing to be ashamed of – we tend to cling to it more, the whiter it gets – what gives us pause, what makes those of us who rely on the fascination with old cars worry about, is that the old guys might not be replaced with youngsters who will carry the torch and take their place one day as the Old Guys, and so forth and so on.

We’re in a unique position in this collector car universe right this minute: The crowd that came up with the very idea of a “collector car” is still with us, while an entirely new generation of gearheads largely ignores it. Less of a damn just couldn’t be given by the youngest-slash-newest on the spectrum, while we’re losing more of the originators by the month on the other end.

And, truth be told, the only time our Old Guys give those young souls out there much more than a passing “Bah…” is when they wonder why nobody stops by to pick up a wrench, or contemplate what might happen to the collection they’ve invested so much sweat and equity into after they’re gone. But to find oneself on the center point of that spectrum is a pretty exciting place to be.

The middle. I’m not an old guy yet, but I consider Old Guys “hella legit,” as the kids say. At the same time, that 23-year-old – the one rolling the lowered Honda with the bolt-on muffler and chrome tip courtesy of the accessories aisle at Pep Boys – is old enough to be my son. Technically.

And from here, I love what’s happening all across the collector car spectrum. I’m a member of what’s referred to these days by marketing think tanks as the “Youth Mode” generation: We don’t identify with what’s generally accepted as the standards of our actual age, as much as we identify with the cultural movements we value.

When my dad was 44, he was considered middle-aged, he was the father of two teens, was halfway through the mortgage on the house, had a few cars in the driveway and was just starting to think about what he was going to do in 20 years when he was ready to retire from the school district he had dedicated two of my own lifetimes to by that point.

Now, at that same age, I look down at my own feet and realize that I’m wearing the same brand of sneakers I wore 20 years ago, which also happens to be the same shoe the 14 year-old kid down the street with the skateboard is wearing. And we both wear them for the same cultural statement they make. That’s an example of living in Youth Mode: simultaneously respecting the responsibilities of middle-age and the energetic power of youth.

So, here we are at this crucial point in the collector car continuum: The originators are a quickly-diminishing group, and the newest a) don’t seem to realize they’re losing a valuable resource and knowledge base in them and b) are creating their own interpretation of what the Old Guys created for them so many years ago.

What does that look like in the real world? Well, it means that important, private car collections are being auctioned off instead of being passed to the next generations to privately curate. It also means that a beautiful tradition of the mastery of the mechanical world is quickly being lost (as addressed in works like Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class As Soulcraft). It means that kids who are participating in the migration back to urban centers find more value in experiences than pride of ownership – they’re more inclined to use their smartphones to organize and attend a giant party at the beach than figure out how to buy and restore a classic car that could literally and figuratively become the vehicle for such great experiences.

But I contend that all is not lost. I believe that our position in the middle requires that we become the bridge between two ends of the collector car spectrum that, for a host of reasons, don’t talk to each other.

Remember that skateboard culture I mentioned earlier? Yeah, well my generation – the Youth Mode – created that. And when professional skateboarder Max Schaaf so eloquently described the embrace of Sixties and Seventies-era “chopper” motorcycles by the industry he came from as “the retirement program for old pro skaters,” he put a name to what I think has the potential to be the bridge that will preserve what came before us and protect the future of the industry – nay, way of life.

The Youth Mode generation can boast that it applied the Do-It-Yourself tenets of the early Punk Rock and Street Art movement it came from (in the Eighties) to collectible old tin – be it motorcycles or hot rods or lowriders or customs or vintage trucks – but the motivating factor was accessibility and low price-of-entry. Not too different from the motivations of the early car collectors just after WWII, albeit with different interpretations of value. While those first collectors were interested in restoration and preservation, the members of Generation X and Generation Y are as interested in customization and creating statements of personalization.

So, what do we do to ensure that the collector car pond is periodically restocked long after we go belly up? The answer lies somewhere between showing respect for both the interests and motivations of that 23 year-old and the knowledge base of the surviving first-gen car collectors.

It ain’t gonna be easy to get them both in the same room at the same time, but as the living bridge, it’s up to my generation to actively participate as story-teller, ambassador, cultural attaché, archivist, creator, curator and mentor. In the future, will the last remaining Hispano-Suizas and Iso Grifos of the world be relegated to museums like Fabergé eggs? Maybe. Will boattail Rivieras and Laguna S3s become the darlings of concours events to come? If you look at the pattern of collectibility, that’s not a hard idea to embrace.

One of the major defining aspects of a burgeoning Gen-X and Gen-Y-as-collectors movement is the practice of tying a car’s value directly to its representation of a cultural movement. That boattail Riviera is more valuable as a period-correct lowrider with a custom “circuit-board” paint job and 100-spoke gold-plated Dayton wheels than a factory restoration. That AMF-era Harley sportster is worth more as a chopper built by Brandon Casquilho over at Mullins Chain Drive in Richmond, California, because of his contributions as a writer, BMX frame fabricator and Instagram star, as much as his obvious talents as a chopper builder.

All that stuff matters to Gen-Xers and Yers. And the DNA woven through a bike coming out of his shop has intrinsic value that can’t be realized any other way. Not unlike the value of the patina in Native American silver jewelry only acquired by wearing it or the organic imperfections of handmade Japanese swords.

Make or Hack, it really boils down to the central theme of modifying and/or building something to fit one’s personal tastes and values. And whether it’s website code, a motherboard, a can of paint and a bare wall, a vintage Puch moped, a pair of jeans, a Stromberg carburetor or a ’29 Model A roadster, the value for Gen-Xs and Gen-Ys comes in the experience those physical things help produce.

As long as we can foster their participation in the collector car world on their terms, the DNA of the industry, nay, way of life will never be threatened.

Now that you’ve read about a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO Berlinetta selling for $38.115 million here and in every other news outlet from the New York Times down to Better Homes and Gardens, you’re probably wondering exactly what the sale means for the collector car hobby in general.

On the one hand, Bonhams, the auction company that handled the sale, noted in its press release that the world record price “demonstrat(ed) the confidence in the collector car market and the strength of the Ferrari brand.” Of course, who wouldn’t expect a Ferrari 250 GTO to sell for a world record auction price? At least two (that we know of) have (or have allegedly) sold for more than the $34.65 million hammer price in private sales over the last couple years, and the Ferrari 250 GTO has almost unassailable standing at the top of the blue-chip market.

(While we’re on the topic, let’s compare the selling price of this 250 GTO and those other two selling prices: $35 million paid for 3505 GT in 2012 and $52 million paid for 5111 GT last year. Of the two, only the former has been solidly confirmed; some observers have cast doubt that the latter sale actually took place. In which case, the final $34.65 million bid for 3851 GT is keeping in line with the private sale history of the model.)

On the other hand, most of the coverage of the sale so far has noted that the final selling price fell short of expectations even though it broke the previous auction record by almost $9 million, or about 29 percent. Before the auction it seemed as though everybody had some wild guess as to what it would sell for, with some speculating that it could fetch $75 million or more. Jalopnik summed up the post-auction let-down well with its headline “Cheap-ass Ferrari 250 GTO sells for just $38 million.” The reaction to the sale so far has taken on the demeanor of ancient Romans walking away from the Coliseum disappointed that they didn’t see more bloodshed.

And this is all coming before Bonhams even wrapped up its auction, which continues tonight, and before other Monterey auctions even got started. Will we see other, lesser auction records fall over the weekend? Likely. Will they have repercussions across the collector car hobby, given that the Monterey auctions – along with the Scottsdale auctions in January – tend to set the tone, if not the example, for collector car pricing? Again, likely. Will the collector car market still tank, as at least one prominent auction observer recently noted, or will prices continue to climb, as the hedge fund managers and other investors pouring money into the collector car market certainly hope will happen? Reply hazy try again.

It has been decades since a Ferrari 250 GTO even came up for sale at a public auction, and while rarer and faster cars have come and gone since, toppling record prices paid, none were as hotly anticipated as the 250 GTO that sold Thursday night for $38.115 million, setting a new world record for a car sold at public auction.

Chassis 3851 GT, the 19th of 39 GTOs built, took second place in its first outing, at the 1962 Tour de France Automobile with its first owner, French racer Jo Schlesser, behind the wheel. At its second outing, however, Parisian Henri Oreiller, who co-drove with Schlesser in the Tour de France, died at the wheel of the GTO in a crash that severely damaged the car. Schleser sent the GTO back to Maranello to have it rebuilt and it reappeared in 1963 with a new owner, Paolo Colombo, who continued to race it in hillclimbs and track events – as did its next owner, Ernesto Prinoth.

Fabrizio Violati then bought 3851 GT in 1965 and used it primarily as a road car, reportedly hiding it from his family by only taking it out at night. Eventually, he built up a collection of rare Italian sports cars – the Maranello Rosso collection – but held on to the GTO until his death in 2010.

While most of the Maranello Rosso collection has reportedly been sold to the Louwman Museum in Holland, 10 cars from the collection – including 3851 GT – crossed the block Thursday evening at the Bonhams Quail Lodge auction with no reserve. While Bonhams did not publicly offer a pre-auction estimate for the GTO, officials said they expected the car to sell for $30 million to $40 million, speculation on the car’s value ranged wildly, from the $52 million reportedly spent in a private sale for 5111 GT last October up to $75 million.

Pretty much all pre-auction speculation agreed that 3851 GT would eclipse the world record for a Ferrari sold at public auction (previously the 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4*S NART Spider that sold for $27.5 million at RM’s Monterey auction in 2013) as well as the record for any car sold at public auction (previously the Fangio-raced 1954 Mercedes W196 that sold for $29.65 million at the Bonhams Goodwood auction in July 2013).

Bidding started at $10 million, quickly rose to $20 million and $30 million, then scaled its way up to the hammer price of $34.65 million – $38.115 million including premiums. All 10 cars from the Maranello Rosso collection at Bonhams sold, for a combined $65.945 million.

The Bonhams Quail Lodge auction will conclude Friday, August 15. For more information, visit Bonhams.com.

What cars will younger enthusiasts want to collect? What cars won’t they collect? What cars are they collecting right now? We can almost guarantee that the answers won’t match up with the cars that dominate the current collector scene, but how far off will they differ?

* Earlier this year, the Sometimes Interesting blog talked with Dean Lewis, proprietor of Old Car City in Georgia, which he claims to be the world’s largest (4,000-plus cars) and oldest (late 1940s) junkyard, and illustrated the story with plenty of Galen Dalrymple photos. (thanks to Dan Roth for the tip.)

Photo courtesy Bonhams.

* Rick Carey, auction editor over at Sports Car Digest, wondered aloud this week whether the collector car market was due for a severe correction that could take place as soon as this coming week, when all eyes turn to Monterey.

It’s not often that a genuine supercharged Bugatti Type 35 changes hands, and it’s even rarer that you’ll find one with the provenance of an infamous character like the fascinating Hellé Nice. But attendees of Gooding & Company’s upcoming Pebble Beach Auctions on August 16-17 will have the opportunity to bid on a beautiful example with wonderful heritage.

Hellé Nice was a talented, bold and beautiful race car driver, a true pioneer of the sport in her day. She owned and raced this very car in the early 1930s, competing at prestigious international circuits like Le Mans, Reims and Monza. Mlle. Nice would develop an enviable association with the Bugatti marque, leading to her nickname, “The Bugatti Queen.” She was the third owner of chassis 4863 – built in December 1926, purchased by Mlle. Nice on March 29, 1930- having acquired it directly from the Molshiem factory. This car would continue its competitive career into the early postwar era with subsequent British owners Tom S. Grimshaw and E.V. Buck. Initially built in naturally aspirated form, the car gained a supercharger sometime in the 1930s, before Mr. Grimshaw bought it from London Bugatti dealer Jack Lemon Burton in 1938.

This accomplished race car was imported to the United States in the early 1980s, and in the early 2000s, it received a comprehensive mechanical restoration under the charge of Pebble Beach Concours-winning Bugatti-specialist restorer Scott Sargent, of Vermont’s Sargent Metalworks.

This upcoming event will not be the first time that Gooding & Company president David Gooding has encountered chassis 4863; he got to know the car back in 1997, when he worked at the Christie’s auction house and then-owner Ben Rose consigned it at the firm’s Lyndhurst Car Sale, where it brought $486,500 (the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $722,454 today).

“This car was the star of Chicago collector Ben Rose’s collection,” David recalls. “I had driven it. At that time, it was painted in its original blue -the color it was when Hellé Nice owned it- and done to a concours level. After Mr. Rose owned it, the subsequent owner repainted to the green-khaki color it wore in previous decades. It’s been driven quite a lot, is in fantastic condition and has a patina that looks wonderful.”

We asked David if there have been any comparable Bugatti sales that might indicate what this car could bring from the right bidder. He explained;

“There haven’t been any real supercharged Grand Prix Bugs for sale at auction in a long time; we’ve heard of some private sales in the $3.5 million range, and even more than that, but there are no public sales to use as comparables. There has not been a good Grand Prix Bugatti for sale in a very long time; we had a nice 35C at Pebble Beach that we sold in 2006 for $2.585 million.”

Gooding & Company has offered a pre-sale estimate of $2.8-$3.5 million, considering this car’s flawless mechanical condition, welcoming patina and incomparable heritage. While Mlle. Nice’s Bugatti may well bring a record sale figure, we wondered if he felt it would disappear into a collection, or remain in use.

“I think this car will continue to be driven,” David said; “Bugatti owners are very enthusiastic, and have been from when the cars were new. And they’re so wonderful to drive. It’s my hope that it will be used and driven. I’ve been in other Grand Prix cars, and this one is particularly sharp and lightning fast. It’s a very, very potent Grand Prix Bug; I would suspect that the new owner will drive and enjoy it.”

In addition to this historic racer, Gooding & Company’s Pebble Beach Auctions will offer a wide variety of cars that range from a V-8 Ford woody wagon to a McLaren F1. Their catalog for this event is available online to view at no cost, and a printed copy can be ordered. If you can’t be on-site at the Equestrian Center for the free public preview, or be there for the auctions at 5 p.m. on Saturday, August 16, and 6 p.m. on Sunday the 17th, you can watch the action live online via the Gooding & Company website.

A dollar, it seems, just doesn’t buy what it used to, and nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to shopping for a new car. While many of us reminisce about the “good old days” of affordable performance cars and low-cost gasoline, were cars (and their care and feeding) really less expensive then, or has time merely clouded our judgement?

To answer that particular question, I put together numbers comparing the price of a base V-8 Ford Mustang coupe, a base Chevrolet Corvette coupe and a base Porsche 911 coupe, examining 1965, 1985, 2005 and 2013 model years to get a good spread without overwhelming us in data. First, I converted the cars’ historic prices to current dollars (with the help of MeasuringWorth.com), to serve as a benchmark and to help keep things in perspective.

Next came a bit more research. Using data on the average wage of a production worker (again from MeasuringWorth.com), I calculated the hours of work required to buy each of the cars above, assuming (unrealistically, of course) no other household expenses. I also researched the average cost of gas for the years cited (from the U.S. Department of Energy), and calculated how long one would need to work to pump 10 gallons in the tank. The results of my research were not as consistent as one might think.

In 1965, the sticker price of a new V-8 powered Ford Mustang coupe was $2,734.00 (the equivalent of $19,900 today), and the average production worker made $3.00 per hour; to purchase a new Mustang coupe with a V-8 engine, therefore, required 911 hours of work, or about 23 weeks. By 1985, the cost of an eight-cylinder Mustang had risen to $9,885.00 (today’s $21,100), while production wages had risen to $12.50 per hour, meaning that one needed to toil for just 791 hours (120 hours less than in 1965) to buy one. In 2005, the scales tipped in the opposite direction: the V-8 Mustang was priced at $25,815 (today’s $30,300), and a production worker made $23.92 per hour, requiring 1,079 hours of work to buy the car. The picture darkens a bit further in 2013, where the $31,545 Mustang requires a worker earning $27.15 per hour to put in 1,162 hours in order to pay the Ford off.

1965 Corvette convertible. Photo courtesy GM Media Archives.

A 1965 Chevrolet Corvette carried a list price of $4,233 ($30,800 today), requiring a worker earning the wages listed above to put in 1,411 hours of work, or about 35 weeks. In 1985, with the Corvette priced at $24,873 ($53,100 today), a hefty 1,990 hours of work were required, but later years saw a bit of good news. A 2005 Corvette, priced at $44,245 ($52,000 today), required just 1,850 hours of work to own, and a 2013 Corvette (priced at $50,595) took a relatively comparable 1,864 hours to pay off.

In 1965, a Porsche 911 stickered for $6,370 (today’s $46,300), requiring the same blue collar worker (not exactly the Porsche’s demographic) to work for 2,123 hours, a little more than an entire year, not counting vacations. By 1985, the price had jumped to $31,950 (today’s $68,200), requiring 2,556 hours of work to own, and in 2005 the price of $69,300 (today’s $81,500) meant the same line worker needed to put in 2,897 hours. Last year, the numbers climbed further, with the $85,250 911 requiring 3,140 hours of effort.

1965 Porsche 911. Photo courtesy Porsche North America.

As for gas, our fictitious employee needed to work one hour in 1965 to pay for ten gallons of gas, priced at $0.30 per gallon. In 1985, with gas priced at $1.13, 0.90 hours (or, if you’d prefer, 54 minutes) of labor were required to buy 10 gallons, but this figure would climb again for 2005. Then, with gas at $2.30 per gallon, 0.96 hours (56 minutes) were needed for the partial fill-up, but the biggest jump came between 2005 and 2013. Today, 1.27 hours (just over 76 minutes) are needed to put 10 gallons of gasoline in the tank, making the ritual of a Saturday night cruise noticeably more expensive.

That’s quite a bit of data to throw out there, but there are some simple takeaways. Mustang fans were better off in 1985 (from a cost perspective, anyway), as the Ford was less expensive to purchase and fuel than it was in 1965. For Corvette fans, 1985 was an expensive year, but the cost to buy a Corvette coupe over the past eight years really hasn’t changed significantly (the cost to fuel it, however, has gone nowhere but up). As for the Porsche 911, each year of the study has seen increased cost, but as the only foreign car examined, exchange rates likely account for some of this rise.

That said, there are extenuating circumstances to factor into the equation as well. In 1985, the Fox platform Mustang was already six years old, and sales were falling to the point where Ford gave serious consideration to killing the model off altogether, or replacing it with a front-wheel-drive model that would eventually become the Ford Probe. Mustang prices were low in 1985 because Ford was doing all it could to push cars out the door; in contrast, 2005 was the year that the retro-styled Mustang debuted, while 2013 was just two years after the launch of the brand’s 5.0-liter “Coyote” V-8 engine, and both factors increased the Mustang’s appeal (and hence, its price). Similarly, the Corvette pricing shown is relatively consistent as 1985 represented just the second year for the fourth-generation car (a major redesign), while 2005 represented the first model year for the sixth generation. Even final model cars can occasionally raise pricing, as seen with the 2013 Corvette; with a new model due in showrooms, 2013 represented the last opportunity for Corvette buyers to purchase a C6 model. As for the Porsche, model differences aside, status has always factored into 911 sales and marketing. It is expensive because it can be expensive, and Porsche would gain nothing by producing a down-market 911 (similar to the concept behind the original Porsche 912).

Another thing not factored in this research is the complexity of modern automobiles. Each generation of car above brought with it added complexity in the form of more computerization, more required safety systems, and (in some cases) added emissions regulations. The days of the price-adjusted new $19,900 Mustang V-8 have come and gone, and the same can be said of the $30,800 Corvette and the $46,300 Porsche 911. Those shopping for new examples will have to face that pricing reality, which is just one reason why the Hemmings used car classifieds are so appealing to the rest of us.